WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Kevin Phillips, Arrogant Capital (Little Brown, 1994). Jonathan Rauch, Demosclerosis (Times Books, 1994). Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Belknap Press, 1995). F or well over five years now, accounts of the American mood have used such descriptions as "sour" and "cranky" and "irritable." After a political stasis that seemed to give congressional incumbents life tenure, impatient voters began a housecleaning in 1990. Even before the earthquake of 1994, the 1990 and 1992 elections had produced congressional turnover at levels comparable to such previous high- water marks as the post-Watergate election of 1974. In 1992 the voters ended the Republican Party's 12-year reign in the White House and then two years later handed the new incumbent the worst mid-term defeat since 1946. Through all this, except for a brief interlude during the Persian Gulf War, polls registered record high levels of Americans...